The Agony Column eBook

CHAPTER I

London that historic summer was almost unbearably
hot. It seems, looking back, as though the big
baking city in those days was meant to serve as an
anteroom of torture—­an inadequate bit of
preparation for the hell that was soon to break in
the guise of the Great War. About the soda-water
bar in the drug store near the Hotel Cecil many American
tourists found solace in the sirups and creams of
home. Through the open windows of the Piccadilly
tea shops you might catch glimpses of the English
consuming quarts of hot tea in order to become cool.
It is a paradox they swear by.

About nine o’clock on the morning of Friday,
July twenty-fourth, in that memorable year nineteen
hundred and fourteen, Geoffrey West left his apartments
in Adelphi Terrace and set out for breakfast at the
Carlton. He had found the breakfast room of that
dignified hotel the coolest in London, and through
some miracle, for the season had passed, strawberries
might still be had there. As he took his way
through the crowded Strand, surrounded on all sides
by honest British faces wet with honest British perspiration
he thought longingly of his rooms in Washington Square,
New York. For West, despite the English sound
of that Geoffrey, was as American as Kansas, his native
state, and only pressing business was at that moment
holding him in England, far from the country that glowed
unusually rosy because of its remoteness.

At the Carlton news stand West bought two morning
papers—­the Times for study and the Mail
for entertainment and then passed on into the restaurant.
His waiter—­a tall soldierly Prussian,
more blond than West himself—­saw him coming
and, with a nod and a mechanical German smile, set
out for the plate of strawberries which he knew would
be the first thing desired by the American. West
seated himself at his usual table and, spreading out
the Daily Mail, sought his favorite column.
The first item in that column brought a delighted
smile to his face:

“The one who calls me Dearest is not genuine
or they would write to me.”

Any one at all familiar with English journalism will
recognize at once what department it was that appealed
most to West. During his three weeks in London
he had been following, with the keenest joy, the daily
grist of Personal Notices in the Mail. This string
of intimate messages, popularly known as the Agony
Column, has long been an honored institution in the
English press. In the days of Sherlock Holmes
it was in the Times that it flourished, and many a
criminal was tracked to earth after he had inserted
some alluring mysterious message in it. Later
the Telegraph gave it room; but, with the advent of
halfpenny journalism, the simple souls moved en masse
to the Mail.